"It looks like XFCE will be the 'next Gnome2? ... It looks better then in the past and it seems to be pretty comparable with Gnome2. It seems to be a possible to remove pulseaudio from Xubuntu. And of course you can install Fluxbox together with it (I prefer fluxbox also myself ;) )" There should be Linux audio apps, that need GTK2 libs. When I need to switch from KDE3 to GNOME2 I needed to change my work flow, but there wasn't a loss off apps. IIUC when they stop GNOME2, we'll lose apps, regarding to GTK2 libs that should be needed. An Ubuntu Studio coder already rewrites an app. XFCE isn't a GNOME2 successor, at least not for me, since GNOME2 is my KDE3 successor. I lower my sight when switching from KDE3 to GNOME2 and doing the same from GNOME2 to XFCE would cause to lower the sight again. When will XFCE became an update that makes it similar to Microsoft and Apple? How often should we switch the DE?